At present, scratch-off lottery ticket games are still very popular. Traditionally, the scratch-off lottery tickets are distributed by sales clerks, who manually tear off a required number of lottery tickets from a lottery ticket tape and sell the lottery tickets to a lottery ticket buyer. However, manual vending requires a professional watcher, and vending errors may occur when the sales clerk is engaged in other tasks, or loss of lottery tickets may even occur. In addition, lottery ticket vending is a public welfare undertaking, and the gross profit rate of the vendor is fixed, lower than other consumer products. With the increase of labor cost and property cost, the traditional manual vending mode is facing a challenge.
In order to more simply and effectively distribute scratch-off lottery tickets, some automatic lottery ticket dispensing devices have been developed, for example, the lottery ticket dispensing devices in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,669,071B1 and 7,562,798B2. Although great progress has been made by these lottery ticket dispensing devices in automatic dispensing of lottery tickets, there still exist certain problems and defects technically.
In the lottery ticket dispensing device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,071B1, a guiding press plate is driven to rotate by a solenoid, and the guiding press plate presses a lottery ticket tape with penetrative parting lines to an assigned position and in contact with a cutter, then an electrical motor rotates reversely and drives the lottery ticket tape to roll back, thereby the cutter cuts off a penetrative parting line on the lottery ticket tape, and a lottery ticket is separated. In such a lottery ticket dispensing device, the rotary motion of a solenoid is employed to drive the guiding press plate; however, the cost of such a solenoid itself is very high, and moreover, the structure of the solenoid is complex, failures and problems tend to occur, and the lifetime is short. When a solenoid is employed to drive the guiding press plate, the pause time of the guiding press plate will be short, which is unfavorable for separating a lottery ticket from the lottery ticket tape. Moreover, when a solenoid is employed to drive the guiding press plate, it needs to add an additional shaft for driving the guiding press plate, which will increase the cost. Additionally, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,071B1, a structure with two press roller is employed to drive the lottery ticket tape, and problems may occur in the ticket dropping process after a ticket is cut off; for example, if there remains a last lottery ticket on the lottery ticket tape, it will be unable to discharge the last lottery ticket. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,071B1, a pair of transmitting-receiving sensors are employed, there exist cumulative errors, and erroneous judgment may be caused by pollutants, for example, paper scraps, on the sensor. Additionally, in the lottery ticket dispensing device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,071B1, no ticket guiding device exists between the cutter and the roller, thus failures such as ticket blocking tend to occur.
In the lottery ticket dispensing device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,798B2, a mechanical clutch assembly is employed to replace the solenoid in U.S. Pat. No. 6,669,071B1 for driving the guiding press plate to realize the separation of lottery tickets. However, the mechanical clutch assembly employed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,798B2 has a complex structure, and it is inconvenient for mounting. Moreover, the mechanical clutch component has strict requirements on machining accuracy and mounting accuracy; otherwise, a ticket cutting error tends to occur. Similarly, in the lottery ticket dispensing device disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,798B2, no ticket guiding device exists between the cutter and the roller, thus failures such as ticket blocking tend to occur.
Therefore, it needs to develop a lottery ticket dispensing device that has higher dispensing efficiency, lower cost, easy operation and high reliability.